I think they are needed to process complex, emotional, and life-changing events. To transmute the unknown into something that can be processed by a group of people. Social and psychic glue. A way for a large group to discharge positive or negative energy in an acceptable manner.

I don't know if rituals really have to be large groups.. or even significant. There was one night where some friends and I were high on LSD, I was driving around, and I came upon an overpass, and just started gunning it. It was thrilling.. and scared the shit out of everyone - but they all liked it too. Better than six flags. After that point, anytime we did acid, I'd take them on that overpass. It was almost like a ritual, if not that.

Of course, that's one ritual that isn't very good for your health. I wouldn't recommend it.

I think they are needed to process complex, emotional, and life-changing events. To transmute the unknown into something that can be processed by a group of people. Social and psychic glue. A way for a large group to discharge positive or negative energy in an acceptable manner.

The Ritual of MBTI

Perhaps rituals mark a point of transition. Baptism marks our transition to christianity. Marriage marks our transition to a new household. And the Last Rites marks our transition to the next life.

Transition is difficult. We are clinging to the past but haven't yet reached the future. We are in No Man's Land. We are without a map to guide us. We are bereft but not satisfied. We are desperately in need of support. But we are meaning creating animals so we created rituals and traditions to help us transit from womb to life, from single to the married state, and finally we pay the Ferryman to convey us across the River Styx.

Unfortunately modernity has done away with many rituals and traditions and leaves us in a state of anomie. And so we have no alternative but to accept we live in a time of anomie, a time of hiatus, a time when things are not clear, where we don't know where we have come from and don't know where we are going.

And being homeless we grasp onto anything that presents itself like the New Age and MBTI.

Yes, we look around and see we are in the midst of a huge social ritual called MBTI. It was commissioned by the military/industrial complex seventy years ago and used by them ever since. Four million Americans alone do the MBTI test every year. Yet it has the ambience of a private, secret cult that is unknown to the uninitiated. It feels like a secret society, when it is a vast, open ritual.

Yes, the ritual of MBTI helps us transition into the military, or into a job, or in and out of a relationship.

Antepirrhema

Ritual is also a repetition. And repetition is the only thing necessary for a trance. So ritual puts us in a trance where we accept uncritically whatever is suggested. This may be religious dogma; it may be our membership of a social group; or even our identity.

MBTI is a ritual which we repeat over and over again and so we enter the MBTI trance where we uncritically accept a phoney personality test commissioned by the military/industrial complex.

We uncritically accept the propaganda that it will help us understand ourselves and one another. We believe it will help us get a job, even a job in the military. And we believe it will help us get a relationship. And we even believe it will help us get out of a relationship. MBTI can do anything because it is magical.

The four letters are a magical incantation, a ritual which we love to repeat over and over to one another.

MBTI is like the Ancient Greek Antepirrhema, an answering chant, that we chant to one another across the internet.

So Ancient Greece and the internet are finally one in the ritual of the noosphere.